1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, a program, and an image processing apparatus. Particularly, the invention relates to an information processing apparatus and the like for determining a band-shaped rectangular area having a maximum height, which satisfies a condition that the area is on the upper side of a first point group and on the lower side of a second point group.
2. Description of the Related Art
In Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-299804 and the like, it has been proposed to create a single panorama from multiple images that are continuously shot by panning. If multiple images have been shot with their vertical positions misaligned, a cropped area (rectangular area) to be cropped as a panorama has to be fixed at the time of creating the panorama from the multiple images. In the past, a user has designated this cropped area manually.
Here, designating a cropped area will be described with reference to a specific example. For example, let a case be considered in which the user captures five images P1-P5 as shown in FIG. 20 while panning a scene of buildings B1-B4 as shown in FIG. 19, and tries to create a single panorama from these five images P1-P5.
A hatched area A1 in FIG. 21 shows an example of a user-designated cropped area. Also, a hatched area A2 in FIG. 22 shows another example of the user-designated cropped area. For panoramas, height is more important than width. Accordingly, it would be better to designate the area A2 shown in FIG. 22 than the area A1 shown in FIG. 21. FIG. 23 shows a panorama PN cropped from the five images P1-P5, using the area A2 of FIG. 22 as a cropped area.
Furthermore, an area A3 shown in FIG. 24 shows still another example of the user-designated cropped area. In this example, there is no pixel data on the hatched area, and thus pixel values cannot be fixed and processing becomes inexecutable. Hence, this area A3 is not desirable.